Friday, 8 November 2013

Inspired by Matisse

I had a wonderful day at the workshop yesterday, although the drive there and back was horrible. I got terribly lost in the morning, so it took an hour and a quarter instead of about 45 minutes, and then parking was a nightmare. And coming home I got stuck in rush hour traffic, so that took about an hour and a quarter too. But once I'd arrived, and had a cup of tea and done some deep breathing all was well. I was just thankful that I'd left home in plenty of time.

We started by looking at some of Matisse's later work, when he was confined to a wheelchair and focussed on cut paper rather than paint. And then we started cutting paper too; it was very liberating, just like being back in primary school. We all made a lot of mess, but tried various different paper cutting techniques.

Do you see the vase? I bought it at a summer fair earlier this year and used it as my inspiration for the work.

Once we all had loads of little pieces cut out, we started to play even more, choosing colours for our background and then setting our cut outs on the background. This is what I ended up with.

We had time in the afternoon to piece the background, trace the design, transfer it to bondaweb, iron the shapes onto fabric, cut them out, and iron them to the background. I'll finish it off over the next few days I hope.

At the end of the afternoon we laid all our designs out on the floor to look at. It was great to see how different they all were. I know that this is a technique I'll use again.

What a great project! Hopefully the journey will get better once you get familiar with the route. I think I would start a trip like that with a trip to the coffee shop for a nice hot beverage to sip along the way while the radio plays my music of choice.